I also like them for the same reason. The languages themselves evolve slowly (Clojure) or not at all (Common Lisp). A library that emphasizes simplicity and d

I also like them for the same reason. The languages themselves evolve slowly (Clojure) or not at all (Common Lisp). A library that emphasizes simplicity and does One Thing Well can be stable and continue to be useful indefinitely. There are network effects too -- if my library uses stable libraries and is built on a stable language, it need not change at all. On the other hand, there are the big libraries that, for convenience, pull one or two small things from several others -- their surface area becomes so large they are practically guaranteed to generate more work in terms of security updates, dependency conflicts, and the like. I experience this at times developing in Clojure, whose hosted nature means issues can emerge from the Java ecosystem, which is obviously enormous and dynamic. We recently had a defect at work relating to a conflict between transitive (Java) dependencies from a third party library used to serialize exceptions prior to transmission to their service, and another tool used only for generating "literate"-style code documentation. While not a production defect, it cost us some time and could have been avoided (both by us and the libraries' authors) by more hard-headed evaluation of the tradeoffs involved in introducing certain dependencies in the first place.